National Member Associations (NMAs) share their experiences

The first Real World Evidence Conference was held in France on 11th June 2019. It was organized by AMMIS, IFAPP’s French National Member Association.

Modern health systems produce huge amounts of health data, and more data are generated outside these systems through multiple human activities (social networks, connected objects, applications and so on). Health authorities and pharmaceutical companies are aware of the potential of this massive amount of data (“Big Data”) from multiple sources, to promote the health of the population and to improve care (identification of disease risk factors, assistance in diagnosing, choosing and monitoring the effectiveness of treatments, pharmacovigilance, epidemiology, etc.).

All stakeholders are seeking to organize their collection and exploitation, which poses significant technical and human challenges.

Four speakers representing the French Health Authority and the Pharmaceutical Industry were present to contribute to the debate on this issue. They shared their ideas and projects together with concrete examples of what has already been done in this regard.

For example, in France, the creation of a “Health Data Hub”, a governmental initiative, is one of the major projects for the French Artificial Intelligence Strategy.

The Health Data Hub is recruiting engineers, developers, data specialists, medical, legal, cybersecurity and other experts for the operational implementation of a health data sharing platform. Such a platform, facilitating interactions between producers of health data, users and citizens within a high security environment, is essential for the emergence of innovations in the field. It is also required by the institutional actors (ministries, agencies and operators, by the decision-makers to carry out their missions and for the development of increasingly personalized medicine to be made available to as many people as possible.

Feedback from a participant:
“The meeting was useful in understanding how different actors of the French Health System and Pharmaceutical Industry approach RWE data. The presentations were very practical, and I left with a lot of new insights”